New Jersey means business, but when factors related to the pandemic challenged global commerce and depleted financial resources, fiscal matters grew complicated for not just the Garden state, but the world.
Hoping to return the local economic infrastructure to its former glory, the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce has planned the “ReNew Jersey Business Summit” on Wednesday and Thursday, April 13 and 14, at the Borgata Hotel in Atlantic City. The event welcomes professionals to freely engage with each other about New Jersey’s most pressing issues.
The two-day affair includes general sessions, which serve as interactive discussions between a panel of subject experts and the audience, networking opportunities, and a business expo featuring products and services. Gov. Phil Murphy will also be a keynote speaker at the event.
Conversation is not limited to these issues, but four specific topics will be directly addressed — taxes and incentives, health care costs, infrastructure and environment issues, and the labor shortage — to find solutions and present them to state legislative leaders for review.
On April 13, the business expo kicks off the summit from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. The general session, consisting of consecutive panels, will be from 1 to 6 p.m., followed by the evening networking cocktail reception from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Murphy will give his remarks at 5:30 p.m.
On April 14, the morning networking breakfast is from 7:30 to 9 a.m. The second general session from 9 a.m. to noon comprises two panels and input from legislative leaders.
Registration is $175, and attendees can register up to the date of the event online, as well as find information on event policies, at the NJ Chamber website, my.njchamber.com.
As NJ Chamber’s February 28 press release states, “this will be only the third time in its 111-year history that the N.J. Chamber has hosted a statewide business summit.” A similar event in 2015 at the Borgata amassed 525 attendees.
Ray Zardetto, the senior vice president of communications with NJ Chamber, is optimistic that those numbers will be outdone.
“The pandemic brought some unprecedented changes to businesses,” Zardetto says. “I think the appetite’s been very strong for another one of these for the purposes of discussing the main point of the summit, which is ‘how do we really kickstart New Jersey’s economy again? How do we get back up to full throttle?’”
In 2015 NJ Chamber surveyed more than 400 business executives and members about what their most pressing concerns were at the time. From those results, the first business summit agenda was formed — this year reflects current, and similar, feedback. Taxes are always a topic of discussion for New Jersey, but the NJ Chamber previously tackled workforce readiness, regulations and mandates, as well as transportation and infrastructure projects.
“When we did the 2015 summit, and of course we surveyed our attendees afterwards, in essence, what was good about it, what could we improve? By far, the single highest score we got across the board was how interactive the event was. It wasn’t just people talking or giving speeches. It was a fully interactive discussion among the panelists and the audience, and that’s what this one is going to be, too,” Zardetto says.
In recent years where the pandemic has brought forward new concerns, significant changes have been tracked through data and are ready to be addressed by leaders of all industries at the business summit.
The New Jersey Business and Industry Association reported that about 34 percent of New Jersey businesses reported “difficulty hiring employees [in January of 2022], more than employers in neighboring states and the national average,” as found by the U.S. Census Bureau Pulse Survey.
Likewise, NJ.com’s Derek Hall and Brent Johnson wrote in their March, 2022, article “Murphy unveils plan for big property tax rebates to nearly 2M N.J. households” that in 2021, “the average bill in the state in 2021 was a record $9,284, the highest in the nation,” while growing about 2 percent annually.
Zardetto says that with these established difficulties, encouraging more communication can benefit everyone.
“There’s some very clear, very obvious challenges that businesses are facing now. One is when to reopen, how to reopen fully, [and] what liabilities are there,” Zardetto says. “Businesses need capital to invest in. There’s of course, labor and workforce shortage. There’s still issues with regard to what kind of taxes the state may or may not levy on businesses going forward. There’s a lot of regulatory issues on the table, all of which we’re going to tackle at the Business Summit.”
“ReNew Jersey” is a substitute for the NJ Chamber’s annual “Walk to Washington,” where business and government leaders take a charter train from Newark to the country’s capital. Because of the pandemic’s gathering constraints, NJ Chamber decided against bringing the event back for 2022.
Gov. Murphy would have been a keynote speaker at the Walk to Washington event, so he is attending the replacement proceedings as well, his presence ensuring that he can engage in productive discourse with leaders from business, labor, and academia.
Since the event is set around the time of deliberations on the state budget, Zardetto explains, the governor will likely talk about the budget, his current priorities, and policies that impact the business community.
By focusing the business summit to just New Jersey, the upcoming event is more geared towards fostering the community-based, local dialogue the state is in need of.
“There are some elements of the Walk to Washington that are part of this event, because there’s some elements of the Walk to Washington that are very important to us and to our members. That includes the ability to discuss ways to make the state’s economy better for business and improve the business climate,” Zardetto says.
That interaction is almost as important as finding effective, unbiased resolutions.
“We’re going to ask all the panelists to only focus on solutions. This is not about blame. It’s not about finger pointing. It’s not about partisan politics. This is just about what is the solution to the problem to the question we’re presenting to your panel, and then we’re going to take an aggregation of these solutions that each of the panels comes up with. [On] the very last panel on the second day, we’re going to present these recommendations to the legislative leadership of the state. We’ll ask them to look at it, react to it, discuss it and see where they are relative to these discussions,” Zardetto explains.
The event is not just open to business leaders, either.
“We’re accepting and inviting all kinds of points of view here, so the more than 500 people we anticipate coming to this event will include business leaders, labor leaders, political leaders, and academic leaders,” Zardetto says. “The business component is going to be large Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, entrepreneurships, [with] all kinds of industries represented.”
The expo is open to all voices, whether a trade group representative, the head of a nonprofit, or a member of the media. For the expo and networking opportunities available, NJ Chamber is navigating uncharted territory.
“Out of the pandemic, [our members are] looking for ways to reach out to potential customers and prospects. So we put this expo together as a way for businesses to showcase their products or services to the attendees,” Zardetto says.
“I would hope that some of the solutions that the panels come up with become a catalyst for real action that helps the economic climate of the state,” Zardetto says, setting his sights on the event as a “building block” for future summits.
He continues that another point of equal importance is the potential for members to form new connections, contacts, and friends through their businesses.
Zardetto’s recommendation is that anyone on the fence about attending the event must remember the innate power of speaking up, particularly when it comes to seeking answers.
“If you think you have something important to say about how the business climate in New Jersey can be better for business? This is the place to say it,” Zardetto says.
